For the past few years, I’ve also been collecting the books of photographer Laura Wilson. I love her book Watt Matthews of Lambshead. Also, each year when I go to Yosemite I end up with another Ansel Adams print. I make the excuse that I’m buying them for my kids to inherit! Yes, there are reasons I have not much money…. and art is one of them.

This little aside from all the fashion is why you are so cool and why your blog and fotos are so interesting and inspiring.

Switching gears for a second: the discussion about the long flared jeans is pretty lame compared with the serious nature of a foto like this. But we are in the era of the 9 zillion dollar jeans so I take it “cum granus salus” . However, jumping into the fray(ed hem) and after much deep thought on the topic, I have concluded that the only jeans that are actually really cool are the original 501s that you buy all stiff and hard and wear until they are falling apart and stringy. Otherwise, I believe it’s not really sartorially ok. Unfortunately I’m short and old and when you’re short and old the most imortant thing is not to look foolish and jejeune or mutton as lamb or whatever terrible fashion faux pas that might mean a loss of dignity. Doug- the dude from Ralph Lauren- has got it right.

Jan. 17, 2002 — Helen Levitt takes you up four flights of stairs in her Greenwich Village brownstone, to the small apartment where she’s lived for the past 35 years or so. Levitt is 88 years old now, and her companion is a yellow tabby named Binky.

Her apartment is Spartan — there’s a tiny galley kitchen, and the furniture is spare and worn. On one wall, there’s a photo clipped from a magazine long ago, showing a mother gorilla dangling her baby.

But there are none of her own pictures — the lyric New York street scenes that she’s best known for.

“I know what they look like, I don’t want to look at them all the time,” she told NPR’s Melissa Block, co-host for All Things Considered.

Helen Levitt is considered “a photographer’s photographer” — little known by the public, but revered by fellow photographers. She has never sought fame, and she’s intensely private. She doesn’t enjoy talking about her life, and doesn’t find it terribly interesting.

At age 88, Levitt still takes pictures — lately, of farm animals, up in the country. In her apartment, there are stacks of boxes of prints. One box is labeled “nothing good”. Another is marked: “Here and There.”

Ms. Levitt is one of my artistic heroes. Someone mentioned De Carava – another hero.

One thing in particular I like in this picture is the attitude of the girl far left. It looks like she’s got a future as a runway model. Check out that posture. That child is damn near voguing.

Helen Levitt developed a lens that was turned at a 45 degree angle so that she could be facing east and take a photo of something south (or north) of her. That way her subjects were unaware that they were being shot and, subsequently, totally unselfconscious.

She was particularly great at capturing kids being kids. Her photos really speak to the nature of human kind, I think. Especially when you see the little boys being so violent in their play and the care with which even the most poverty stricken women take in thier make-up and clothing (as in her Mexico shots).

She’s a no-nonsense lady in a nonsensical world. An artist just for the sake of doing what she’s compelled to do.